Regulators

'Risk' in FM stations airing news, apprehends Prasar head

16 Jan, 2017 - 09:58 AM IST | By indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Prasar Bharati chairman A Surya Prakash has said permitting private FM stations to air news might have security implications and that the government needed to keep that in mind if it were to give them the nod.

From the democracy perspective, the idea of permitting them looked ?very simple? and ?must be done?, but, owing to the internal security concerns and diversity of India, which had thousands of kilometres of borders, the initiative had a ?lot of implications,? he said, PTI reported from Hyderabad.

As some months ago, the government auctioned frequency bandwidth, new FM channels were going to come. And, thus, he said that one needed to seriously ponder over whether to allow FM channels to air news.

While it was correct that private TV channels had been allowed to telecast news, radio, he said, had a ?different audience and different kind of reach.